The Gilder (19 page)

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just weird.”

Lydia put a scoop of ice cream in her mouth, then pointed the spoon at Marina. “Sarah is the one you need to focus on right now.”

“So,
now,
after all these years, you think I should tell her about Zoe?”

“What choice do you have? Do you want to keep living this lie?”

“I just can’t imagine telling her. She’ll be devastated.”

“Possibly, but do you want to keep lying to her every time you write or send photos of Zoe? Just because she doesn’t know what you’re doing doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting her, or more importantly, you. This is about getting your life cleaned up so you can give Zoe what she needs.”

Marina was silent.

“Just think, if you told her everything now, it would free you of all this for the rest of your life.”

“It would mean the end of our friendship.”

“You don’t know that.” Lydia scraped her spoon around the bottom of the dish. “But ask yourself this. What sort of a friendship do you have based on so much deception?”

After Lydia left, Marina sat at the table for a long while contemplating the ruins of their feast. Lydia had offered to help clean up, but Marina had shooed her out, saying it was late, that June would be waiting. Around her, the house was silent except for the occasional groan of a restless radiator. She didn’t appreciate Lydia passing judgment on her friendship with Sarah, but maybe Lydia was right, maybe she should come clean with Sarah, maybe it was time. But how? There were so many lies to unravel. She hated to think of herself as a liar, but one lie had led to another and then another. The first lie had been by omission, in not telling Sarah what happened with Thomas at the photo shoot. This made the second deception unavoidable—how do you tell your best friend that you’re pregnant by her husband when you neglected to tell her that you slept with him in the first place? The next fabrication had been the story about her father needing heart surgery, thus providing an excuse to go home. (She thanked God her father was still alive and well.)

When Marina fled to the States, she’d had every intention of having an abortion but for some reason kept putting it off—until it was too late. Not having any moral or religious reservations, she had never understood her procrastination until one day as she sat watching her ten-month-old daughter learn to walk. Zoe tottered, then fell, then pulled herself up, over and over again, without a tear. Marina had no doubt that this single-minded determination and indomitable spirit had been hard at work in the womb to assure her birth. About six weeks after leaving Italy, she had written a brief note to Sarah saying she’d gotten pregnant on a one-night fling during her first week home and had decided to keep the baby even though the father wanted nothing to do with it. After Zoe was born, in an effort to maintain the false timeline, Marina waited three months before writing a card to Sarah and Thomas announcing Zoe’s birth. It had no birth date and implied that she’d just had the baby.

Marina and Sarah’s correspondence remained steady through the first year after Zoe’s birth. Marina wrote of her work and Zoe’s progress, while Sarah wrote about Thomas’s work and neighborhood gossip, and regularly asked for photographs. Marina was reluctant about sending photographs for fear Sarah might see a resemblance, although she herself saw none and eventually obliged with a slightly out-of-focus shot that had Zoe’s face partly in shadow. Over the next few years as Marina’s life became busier, the time between letters grew longer, until they were exchanging news but once a year in a Christmas letter.

Marina let the water out of the sink, chose a fresh dishtowel from an adjacent drawer, and picked up the first piece of silver. Her thoughts drifted to Thomas. Was it really so ridiculous to think that she was somehow culpable in his death? Not directly, of course, but in the grander scheme of things. When she was pregnant, she’d often wondered if Thomas suspected that her pregnancy was linked to him but always came to the same conclusion—that he was too egocentric and selfish to give anyone’s life more than perfunctory consideration and probably hadn’t thought of her at all. And then he was dead. It had been nearly ten years, but she recalled that day, with its saccharine scent of honeysuckle and the sigh of soggy heat on her neck as she stood by the mailbox with the letter in her hand. She was surprised to see the envelope with its Italian stamps and Sarah’s round, loopy script, and while she was curious about the reason for this deviation from their holiday correspondence, she was in no way prepared for the news of Thomas’s death.

The newspaper clippings, three from the
International Herald Tribune
, filled in the gaps in Sarah’s brief and somewhat vague note.
I thought you’d want to know. They
say
it was an accident.
The first article, dated two months before the note, reported that the hit-and-run accident had happened just after midnight on a narrow street near his studio, and the second article, written the following week, stated that no leads had been found. The third clipping, dated three weeks before Sarah’s note, reported a break-in at Thomas’s studio, in which nothing was stolen but the place had been ransacked. Marina hadn’t known what to make of any of it. It was shocking to think of Thomas dead, really and truly dead, when she had thought of him as fictitiously dead for five years. But, who were “they,” and why had she underlined the word “say”? Did Sarah not believe it was an accident? There was no way to reach her by phone, since Thomas had always maintained that if someone wanted to talk to them, they could come and find them, so Marina had no choice but to write and wait for a response. When she didn’t hear anything after a month, she wrote again, and then once a month, until finally, well into the new year, Sarah replied.

Marina put the last dish away and blew out the candles on the table. Sarah’s letter had been a vague and rambling list of all she’d had to contend with in the months since Thomas’s death. She made no further reference to the break-in or any suspicions about the accident. After that, their correspondence resumed its original pattern, and for the first three years after Thomas’s death, Sarah’s Christmas letters painted a bleak existence.
I don’t know where the days, weeks, and months have gone. I try to do the things I’ve always done, but when I go for my morning coffee I have nothing to say to anyone, and the market no longer has any appeal, as I have no one to cook for. I never realized how much of my life was consumed with tending to Thomas’s needs. Marcello has been a dear, forcing me out once in a while, but I still cannot bring myself to go to Anita’s.

Although she knew that Thomas hadn’t wanted children and Sarah couldn’t have them, when Marina read these letters, a sense of dread seeped into her heart with the realization that, by having Thomas’s child, she had stolen something that by all rights belonged to Sarah, something that might have comforted her in these dark days. Her mind, now overwhelmed with guilt, imagined taking Zoe to Florence, where she would present her to Sarah as some sort of consolation, and Sarah, in her elation at finding a living piece of Thomas, would forgive her.

On the third Christmas following Thomas’s death, Marina received a letter from Sarah that was completely different. She wrote that she’d taken over Thomas’s studio in Santo Spirito, emptied it of his things, and set it up for herself. She was drawing again and had started sculpting in clay, and hoped to cast a bust in bronze before too long. Over the ensuing seven years, her career as a portrait sculptor flourished. She was now represented by a prestigious gallery in Milan, and it seemed she made quite a good living from commissions. In addition, Marina suspected (from reading between the lines) a romantic relationship with the owner of the gallery, but never asked too many questions for fear of inviting questions in return.

The following morning Marina woke to the wallop of rain on the roof. She opened one eye, checked the clock on her nightstand, then burrowed back under the comforter. Thoughts and snippets of her conversation with Lydia the previous evening had churned all night, tossing her into choppy dreams she couldn’t quite recall, beyond a sense of helplessness, leaving her with a scorching thirst. She had experienced this feeling before, as an adolescent, and always upon waking—a deep and abiding thirst that permeated her entire being with an unquenchable yearning, for what, she never knew. She threw the covers back, slid from the bed, and went in search of water.

Sitting on the edge of the tub with a second glass of water, her dream came flooding back, her mind blank one minute, then filled with Technicolor details the next. In the dream she was sitting in a bathtub filled with water holding an infant in her hands, supporting it as it floated and gazed up at her. Then without warning, the water began to drain, rapidly forming a whirlpool into which the baby, suddenly tiny, was sucked around and around. In a panic, she tried to catch it as it spiraled downward toward the drain, but her hands moved sluggishly, refusing her will, and then in the split second before the baby disappeared down the drain, she woke. Marina glanced at the drain, a tingle of fear scurrying up her spine.

Later that morning, Marina stood with her hands on her hips surveying her reflection in the full-length mirror on the backside of her bedroom door. It was the third outfit she’d tried on in an attempt to put together a wardrobe for her trip. She ran her fingers through her thick, wavy hair, twisting it up off her neck as she examined her face first from one side, then the other. Her jaw was still firm, her lips full, but the skin under her eyes was slightly puffy and crinkled at the corners even when she wasn’t smiling. She hoped she would be able to squeeze in a haircut and facial before her departure the following week. She dropped her arms, letting her hair fall to her shoulders, and surveyed the outfit: black wool pants, black cashmere sweater, camel blazer, and black boots—a bit severe, perhaps, but professional. It would do for her presentation. She ran her hand around the inside of the waistband, which felt a bit snug, but it was too late to lose five pounds, especially with Thanksgiving just a few days away. She’d just have to leave the button undone under the sweater.

She turned back to the bed, which was heaped with clothing. “Less is more,” she muttered to herself as she began picking and choosing, creating a smaller pile on the trunk at the end of the bed. She moved a skirt and sweater from the heap to the pile and then back again, exchanging them for jeans and a shirt. Would she wear jeans? Maybe, if she dressed them up with a nice jacket and her good boots. She’d lived in jeans that year in Florence, jeans and T-shirts in the summer, jeans and baggy, coarsely knit sweaters in winter, with the exception of the Christmas outfit Sarah had encouraged her to buy. She’d never worn the skirt again, but she’d resoled the beautiful boots twice and worn them until they looked too tired to take another step. Opening the closet door, she rooted around with her foot in the jumble of Reeboks, clogs, and boots, but not finding them, she dropped to her knees and crawled partway in until she located them at the back of her closet behind her boxes of rarely worn dress shoes. As she pulled them on, she half expected to be transported back in time, but all she felt was the stiff ridges of a crumpled innersole. She tried to recall what Sarah had worn for shoes, but all she remembered was her wild, rusty hair, voluminous skirts, and Indian jewelry. Sarah was now close to fifty, and the thought of her still swathed in her ethnic garb was depressing. Marina pulled the boots off, tossed them in the closet, and retrieved two pieces of luggage from under the bed. A small suitcase and good-sized tote bag would hold enough for five days.

After an attempt at filling the suitcase, only to change her mind and empty it again, Marina decided to abandon the project and head out to the studio to work on her presentation. She had decided to focus on fifteenth-century gilding techniques, which were the basic techniques she’d learned with Sauro and from which all modern practices came. Also, Josh was encouraging her to include an overview of the evolution of her career. There were increasing numbers of women entering the restoration field and, according to Josh, they would be well represented at the conference. Marina wasn’t sure how inspirational her story would be, so much of her own good fortune had come from being in the right place at the right time, but she agreed to make a stab at it. She was aware, however, that in order to tell her story, she’d have to go back to the beginning—a direction the hands of fate seemed to be pushing her none too gently.

By midweek the notes for her presentation were in order and neatly stowed in a manila envelope. Marina sat at her desk, a trestle table she’d found under a heap of yellow newspapers in the back room of a junk shop and which now, after years of butcher’s wax and elbow grease, shone as silky and sublime as a fine antique. She’d placed it against a wall in her studio under a niche that had probably once held a religious icon but now paid homage to a compact stereo system. She stared at her letter to Sarah. She’d used her business stationery, with her gold letterhead across the top. Under it, her black-inked script moved across the page in a stiff backward slant, as if each word were digging in its heels. Next to it, on a yellow legal pad, a scribbled draft of the letter filled the page with crossed-out words and deleted sentences. She exhaled hard through pursed lips. This would have to do. She couldn’t take back the years of hastily scrawled Christmas greetings that shared little and hid much, nor could she begin to explain something she didn’t completely understand herself. At this late date, all she could do was tell Sarah she was coming to Florence, where she was staying, and leave it to her to get in touch. Cowardly, perhaps, but it was the best she could do. Right now she needed to get it in the mail if it had any hope of arriving in Florence before she did. She should have seen to it at the beginning of the week, but she’d put it off in favor of fine-tuning her presentation, and now she was out of time. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Zoe had a half day of school, and Marina had promised to spend the afternoon making pies with her.